MEMO TO A YOUNG ARMENIAN WRITER
*******************************************
Keep a reproduction of San Sebastian pierced with arrows on your desk to remind you that if you write honestly you will be called a fool by fools and a Turk by Ottomanized inbred morons.

Remember, the world is full of charlatans,
every movement generates its own lunatic fringe, and most decent men are cowards
whose favorite slogan is: "I don’t want to get involved." Which means, your enemies may outnumber your friends a hundred to one, and whereas you may always rely on your enemies to attack and insult you, you cannot always rely on your friends to defend you. You will be on your own. And before you decide to quit, remind yourself that this is exactly
what your enemies want you to do so that they may go on deceiving and exploiting their fellow Armenians without running the risk of being exposed as charlatans and bloodsuckers.

P.S. The title of the thread (and only the title) has been edited by MJ for the purpose of making it more suggestive.

ON THE ART OF WRITING***********************************You can learn to write a grammatically correct sentence;you can even learn to be erudite and eloquent;but you cannot learn to write a readable line. To write such a line you must be honest and honesty is neither an art nor a craft but a moral commitment.We are all born honest, of course,but as a result of education, peer pressure, and a number of other factors,we become liars.I speak from experience.As a child I was fed such a steady diet of falsehoods that it took me many years to get my bearings.I remember once, many years ago, when a fellow Armenian spoke to me the way I write today, I buried him beneath such a verbal avalanche of chauvinist crap that he said nothing; he only smiled. I will never forget that smile and the words he never spoke. Some words don’t need to be spoken to be heard and remembered.--------------------

ON A POSITIVE NOTE********************************Some writers are inspired by a beautiful sunset, others by a mysterious smile, still others by a noble idea – heroism, courage, virtue, self-sacrifice…me, I am a ****er for insults. Call me perverse, call me what you will; but I just can’t turn the other cheek. And it never fails: whenever I run out of things to say, one of my readers takes it upon himself to insult me to prove he is smarter or more patriotic than I, and that gives me enough energy to carry on for another month or two.We were made for each other – my readers and I. At this rate, and if things go on as they have been during the last two decades, I will never run out of inspiration even if I live to be as old as Methuselah.--------------------

IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY*************************************To be a writer means to make oneself vulnerable to misunderstanding and insults, not to say unemployment and slum-life. But then, even in the most favorable environment, thinking and expressing one’s thoughts honestly can be a very risky business. Consider Socrates who lived in the Golden Age of Greek civilization. Socrates, a harmless drudge who dedicated his life to answering the question, "What is the right way to live?" Socrates, now revered as one of the most important philosophers of all time: arrested like a common criminal, dragged to court, tried, found guilty by a jury of his peers, condemned to death, and executed.What can I, an extremely minor scribbler, ever hope to expect from my fellow Armenians whose Golden Age belongs to the distant and irrevocable past – make it 1500 distant….I have been allowed to live. What more could I possibly want? Am I not one of the luckiest men between heaven and earth? There are days when I wish I believed in God so that I could thank Him!--------------------

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 14, 2001 11:54AM --------------------------------------------------------------------------------WRITERS / CRITICS*******************************If writers were to echo their readers’ sentiments and thoughts, they would be called echoes not writers.Once upon a time I was dependent on readers’ reactions. Not any more. I suppose with age comes apathy which we like to think of as wisdom. Be that as it may, hell for me is no longer a place populated by readers who disagree with me.

And speaking of hell: I have every reason to suspect there is a special place there reserved for gullible people who are easily hoodwinked, flimflammed and bamboozled with simple explanations, such as: "An infidel deserved to die because it is pleasing in the eyes of Allah," or "A soldier’s first and most important duty is to follow orders because his superiors know best," or again, "Patriotism consists in supporting those in authority even when they happen to be undemocratic, corrupt, tribal, incompetent and crypto-fascist."

I have no interest in gullible dupes, but I go on writing about them only because they echo the sentiments and thoughts of our tribal speechifiers and sermonizers.

If I knew how to pray, I would say: Please, God, give me readers who have acquired the ability to think for themselves.

And then there is the critic who is more like a head-hunter: he is out to get me, no matter what, and wear my shrunken head as a trophy. Reasoning with him is as difficult as converting a cannibal to vegetarianism. Our literature and 1500 hundred years of dissent have made no impact on him. He goes on recycling chauvinist crap as if it were rose-jam. May God have mercy on his soul – if there is a God and he has a soul.

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted July 08, 2001 11:07 AM --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Q/A (ii)***************************You wannabe an Armenian writer? Easy! Here is what you do.First, make sure you have a steady income, because there is no money in it.Second, if you have an ego, starve it, kill it, shoot it, hang it, bury it, dig it up and stone it to death. Because if you don’t, your readers will be more than happy to do it for you.Third, be prepared to be called a fool by fools, an idiot by idiots, and a moron by morons.Fourth, don’t be surprised if you are identified as an agent of Ankara and a hireling of the CIA. Last but far from least: be prepared to be misunderstood. Somewhere someone may discover a method of communication that will eliminate all possibility of misunderstanding; but so far and throughout our millennial history such a one has not yet made an appearance among us or anywhere else for that matter.--------------------

ara baliozian Member Member # 271 posted June 25, 2001 07:23 AM --------------------------------------------------------------------------------REFLECTIONS OF A CONCERNED CITIZEN*******************************************Writing for Armenians is a dead end. Nobody ever wrote for Armenians and amounted to anything. Others see this as a warning and eventually quit. I see it as a challenge and I persevere.The distance between what we think we are and what we are is about the same as that which exists between reason and insanity.

When, during a conversation with a friend, I explained how the secretary of one of our national benefactors had gone around convincing our editors not to publish my commentaries, he (my friend) said: "He can’t do that! This is a free country." Yes, I thought, a free country with fascist Armenian pockets.

I went into writing for the wrong reasons (to achieve fame and fortune) and I got out of it for the right ones (to become a concerned citizen).

My detractors sometimes identify me as a poet and a philosopher, meaning, an idiot with his head in the clouds. They would never identify me for what I am (a concerned citizen) because if there is one of us, there may well be many more. As for poets and philosophers: they might as well belong to the lunatic fringe.

The average Armenian may have no problem naming three Greek philosophers, or even three French, English, and German ones. But three Armenian philosophers?